Tuesday, September 29, 2015

New Release: After You (Me Before You #2) by Jojo Moyes

How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?

Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.

Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future. . . .

For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.

After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes—a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates. Here she does what few novelists can do—revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we ever expected.

My ThoughtsYou are going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone… There is hunger in you, Clark. You just buried it, like most people do. ~Will…

Nothing short of beautiful! An emotionally charged story about healing and learning to believe in yourself after a painful loss. I am in love with this story!

After You was definitely my most anticipated releases for 2015, and it absolutely didn’t disappoint one bit! I fell in love with Me Before You and remember wanting just a few more chapters of Louisa’s life after that climactic ending. Well, the sequel After You feels like the epilogue I desperately needed!

This story picks up about eighteen months after the ending of Me Before You. I’ll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but to get straight to the point, Louisa is truly struggling with moving on from the events that unfolded with Will Traynor. She’s working at a job she has no interest in and is floundering from day to day just trying to keep herself from an impending downward spiral.

After a fateful night where she suffers from a horrible accident, she returns to her hometown to recover and there begins her attempt to heal from her wounds both physical and emotional. Through her recovery, she meets a cast of wonderful characters that slowly become the foundation for her new life.

There were so many layers to this novel that only created a feeling of being fully invested in Louisa Clark’s life. After Will Traynor’s fateful decision in Me Before You, we get to journey with Louisa during her road to recovery. She meets Lily Houghton-Miller and Sam Fielding, who I absolutely adored because in their own ways, they brought back the Lou I knew from the first book. I appreciated how Lily challenged Lou to try and move on without a feeling of guilt clouding her every move. I also enjoyed seeing Sam break down Lou’s walls and teach her to love again. Beautiful set of characters that were a perfect addition to this story!

There was also another set of secondary characters that added a whole new flavor to this novel. The Moving On Circle was a breath of fresh air! Daphne, William, Natasha, Fred, Marc and Jake each complemented the story with their own journey toward recovery. I enjoyed their therapy sessions that revealed their insecurities, fears and hopes. It was all so serious, yet shared with a level of brevity that kept the story flowing with ease.

Louisa’s journey wouldn’t be complete without a few scenes with her quirky but loveable family! Adored them! This family was absolutely flawed to perfection! It was quite clear they cared about Louisa and her struggles. It’s nice to experience a story where family is still one of the most important things in life.

Finally, the spotlight deservedly belongs to Louisa Clark. Throughout this entire journey, she showed compassion, bravery, determination and heart. There wasn’t one moment where I faltered in my allegiance to her plight. I wanted her to become not only the Louisa we knew and loved in Me Before You, but an even better version of that character as she worked hard to recover from a painful experience. Lou has become my favorite female character of 2015! Loved her!!

There were moments and passages in this story that truly hit me hard. JoJo Moyes clearly has a skillful way of cutting to the core of her readers’ emotional pockets with quick punches that leave you breathless for air. After You had many of those moments of brilliance. Overall, I believe fans of Me Before You will enjoy journeying with Louisa Clark as she learns to fall in love and believe in herself again. Beautiful… absolutely beautiful!

5 Snowflakes

About the Author

Jojo Moyes is a British novelist.

Moyes studied at Royal Holloway, University of London. She won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to study journalism at City University and subsequently worked for The Independent for 10 years. In 2001 she became a full time novelist.

Moyes' novel Foreign Fruit won the Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA) Romantic Novel of the Year in 2004.